A philosophy-centered email blast that I subscribe to, Aeon Weekly, included an essay on August 1 by one Alex White, identified as a historian based in Kampala, Uganda. His essay is a critique of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written by Alex Haley (of Roots fame), in which his main point is that Haley skewed his presentation of Malcolm's thoughts and beliefs by selectively omitting ideas developed mostly in the last few years before Malcolm's death, and by using "plagiarism and invention to fill gaps in the narrative."
To support these points, White provides a number of examples noted by a number of critics who have studied the Autobiography in recent years, along with some documents that were unavailable at the time of its writing; and he goes into great detail to show how the selective omission of ideas occurred.
Let me say first that I am by no means a scholar on Malcolm X or Alex Haley. I haven't read widely on either man; I have, in fact, never read Malcolm X's Autobiography, and the only thing I know of Haley's is his novel, Roots. I read it in a two-volume book club edition when it was new, and like most Americans, I think, I watched the television miniseries that came about a year or two later. I enjoyed it, but I knew it was fiction. My interest in these men is entirely down to the fact that a few of my friends take a greater interest than I in both Haley and Malcolm, and that's the only reason I read Mr White's essay at all. My greater interest is in preserving and supporting editorial standards in general and intellectual honesty in particular.
Certainly some of the examples of "plagiarism and invention" that White brings up are damning. They seem to be honestly presented and accurately quoted. But I have particular qualms about two of those examples, one of which I consider intellectually dishonest on White's part, and the other somewhat disingenuous on both Haley's and White's part.
White makes reference to a criticism of Haley by another historian, saying "Haley seems to have re-used material from his previous writing. Malcolm’s comments on the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in Chapter 15, notes the historian Garrett Felber, were lifted directly from Haley’s article on Jackson for Reader’s Digest," published a couple of years earlier. In the following paragraph, he says that Haley "also plagiarised the work of another author...". The implication is that Haley plagiarised himself. This is not possible.
Plagiarism is the use of another person's thoughts or writings without attribution. Alex Haley can write a sentence twice, in two different places, and not give an attribution to himself without committing an intellectual offense. It may not be transparent, but it is not wrong or even unethical to do so. (Though I have to admit, if it were me I would preface the second use of the thought with something like, "As I said so eloquently and insightfully in my manifestly perfect and unassailable article in such-and-such a publication...". But that's vanity, not intellectual necessity, at work.)
I think this is a minor point at best, one made no smaller by the possibility that what Haley did was reuse not his own words but the words of Malcolm X, quoted in the earlier article. But the Autobiography was to be presented as written by Malcolm. One of them said it, and so neither of them is plagiarising by saying it again; and I would not even write this critique were it not for the fact that this is the second occasion on which I've seen it suggested that there is something plagiaristic about re-using one's own thoughts. I don't remember the first example, only that it occurred fairly recently and that at the time I thought, "This writer doesn't know what 'plagiarism' is, and neither does their editor." At the time I put it down to the increasing sloppiness of writing in the Internet Age, but now I begin to suspect something more nefarious: an attempt to label as wrong something that is not wrong, an attempt to broaden the scope of a long-standing offense so as to be able to more easily attack people who have not behaved improperly.
It also serves to add undeserved weight to White's other examples of Haley's failings as a writer. If Alex White intended his example to serve that purpose here, that would be intellectual dishonesty on White's part at worst, and sloppiness at best.
Another of White's examples is that Haley lifted sections of text from a letter written about Malcolm's visit to Africa by Alice Windom, a woman who was among his hosts during that time. After Malcolm visited Accra, Ghana, in 1964, "[s]he then wrote a six-page letter about the visit for friends back home, hoping to counteract any negative coverage of Malcolm’s tour in the US press. ‘It is not for publication,’ Windom wrote in the letter, ‘but use it any other way you wish.’" White states that 56 sentences from that letter appear verbatim in the Autobiography, and that others were altered in minor ways.
This is a more serious charge against Haley's honesty, but without at least the assertion that Haley had the entire Windom letter in his possession, you can't rule out the possibility that Windom's friends, to whom she sent the letter, and who were theoretically aware that Windom did not want the letter published, felt differently about the content, and provided Haley with excerpts or partial photocopies along with the injunction that the letter's writer did not wish to be identified. A weak argument, possibly, but given everything else that was going on in the creation of the Autobiography, it remains a possibility. At the very least, before such an accusation is made, the possibility that friends who received Windom's letters may not have had the same purity of motive regarding the publication of the letter, or may have misinterpreted Windom's reluctance to have the letter published. Or, possibly, they interpreted her permission to "use [the letter] any way you wish" very broadly.
My final quibble with Alex White's essay is his imputation that Haley intentionally and dishonestly omitted late alterations in Malcolm's philosophical thought. On the surface, this appears to be true. But in reading White's essay, I am struck by the timing and import of those changes; and I, at least, can see the possibility that it was Haley's intention to close up the eventually-published Autobiography as a sort of "Part I" in a remarkable story, with the possibility of a continuation with the new ideas fully hashed out in a further volume. That would seem to me to be, artistically, an excellent path to choose: the stark changes in Malcolm's thought, just at the time the book was being put together, would almost demand such a bifurcation, otherwise the scope of the new ideas could not be thoroughly given over to full expostulation. Could it have been in Haley's mind at all, or in his editor's? I don't know. Given the depth of the change, the newness of the development in Malcolm's ideas, and Haley's own need to get the book done, as White describes, it would certainly have seemed a sound way to move ahead to me. The timing would have made for a neat break between the Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and the Malcolm X who came after his break with that group.
In any case, something significant happened that would moot the concept. Malcolm X died by assassination just days after Haley completed the first draft for his review. The publisher "Doubleday announced that they had dropped the book, fearing violent reprisals at their bookstores and offices." Any ideas anyone might have had about the subject likely would have died with him.
Alex White's essay contains numerous examples of intellectual failings on the part of Alex Haley, most of which are fairly unassailable, if true (and they seem to my inexpert eye to be true). Most convincing to me are the allegations that arise from analyses of recorded interviews and records released after both co-writers were dead. (Haley died in 1992.) But White's own failings, minor though they may be, must lead to some questioning of the accuracy and faithfulness of his critique of Haley's work on the Autobiography.
